I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
The idea that a company can grow meat by just adding a few carbs and vitamins to a flask of cells is ridiculous. These synthetic meats are all fed fetal bovine serum. Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is made by drawing blood from bovine fetuses via cardiac puncture at government-approved slaughterhouses. The collected blood is allowed to clot, then centrifuged to separate the serum from the red blood cells. The raw serum is then frozen and undergoes further processing, including sterile filtration, to become suitable for use in cell culture.
Any steak made this way would have to cost thousands of dollars.
Right now it is. The attention these projects are getting is intended to pique the interest of people who can help fund research into making the process more efficient and affordable.